You believe that time is money… and it’s making you miserable

A recent paper from Jeffrey Pfeffer at Stanford and Sanford DeVoe of the University of Toronto argues that promoting an “economic view of time” (that time is scarce and should be thought of in monetary terms) makes us less able to enjoy time off because we always think of it as losing money:

The modern employment relationship generally increases the connection between time and money with important implications for people’s choices about how to use their time, including how much to work and how much to volunteer their time in unpaid activities. Although it may not have been consciously done, modern management seems to have created a hedonic treadmill in which people want to trade time for money and because of thinking of time like money cannot enjoy leisure activities as much.

…the social status of leisure versus work has changed over time so that working is now a status symbol, signaling people’s importance to their organizations—a change that itself may derive in part from how we view time.